Few Point Reyes Light reporters have received as many awards as Ivan Gale (upper left) of Chileno Valley, winning five state and national journalism awards in 2004 alone. The Light’s new owner, Robert Plotkin, on May 3 announced he will no longer display the awards won over the years by Gale and other Light staff. Gale left The Light to earn two master’s degrees from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He is now a business writer for the Gulf News in Dubai, the rapidly growing financial and tourist center in the United Arab Emirates. Here he attends a press conference where Shaikh Ahmed bin Saeed al Maktoum, the uncle of the ruler of Dubai, talks about Emirates airline’s annual results.

When I sold The Point Reyes Light to Robert Israel Plotkin in November 2005, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jesse Hamlin asked me how I felt about leaving the paper in new hands.

“One thing that gives me confidence,” I replied, “is that the citizens of West Marin know what they want in a newspaper. And if you’re not giving it to ’em, they’ll let you know.”

Eighteen months have now past, and West Marin residents have repeatedly let Plotkin (at right) know he is not providing the community newspaper they need and expect. How much longer The Light can survive in its present form is now a topic of much speculation around the community.

Nor is The Light the newspaper it appears to be. Some merchants have been mistakenly billed for ads that had been canceled, and Plotkin’s former printer Scot Caldwell has told others and me that a number of merchants are refusing to pay for these and other ads. Innumerable people have stopped subscribing to The Light, some as long ago as last year, but they have kept receiving the paper each week, Caldwell added. I have heard the same thing from dozens of readers who stopped subscribing to The Light months ago but continue to get it free in the mail.

Meanwhile, with financial help from his landlord, Plotkin is in the midst of refurbishing his office while also publishing dozens of vapid, but relatively expensive, color photos and not paying off creditors to whom he owes significant amounts of money.

When Plotkin’s debt to Caldwell’s Marin Sun Printing reached $11,000, the printer told me, Plotkin changed printers. Plotkin has now paid off $4,000 of that debt, but the damage has been done, and Caldwell will soon be part owner of a new weekly newspaper based in Point Reyes Station. More about that in a moment.

Last year, Plotkin’s inaccurate reporting so offended the Stinson Beach Volunteer Fire Department that Chief Kenny Stephens had t-shirts and bumper stickers printed that say: “Put out The Light until he gets it right.”

Three weeks ago former Light publisher Michael Gahagan, who sold the paper to me in 1975, described one of Plotkin’s self-promotions as “egomeglomaniacal,” adding: “It saddens me that [Plotkin has] so mistakenly misunderstood, dishonored, and continue[s] to defile a community legacy.”

Part of the legacy that Plotkin has taken off The Light’s walls are state and national honors won by Victoria Schlesinger (at left), who like Gale left The Light to earn two master’s degrees in Journalism from Columbia University. The May issue of Harper’s magazine published a whopping nine-page exposé by Schlesinger of the so-called Millenium Villages Project that is supposed to lead the Third World out of poverty. Ironically, Columbia’s Journalism Department paid her way to Kenya to investigate a pilot project run by the director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs. The former Light reporter revealed Sach’s project is a poorly administered fiasco which is trying to replicate a failed experiment from a quarter century ago.

Meanwhile, journalist Elizabeth Whitney of Inverness, who last December organized a community meeting to discuss The Light’s inadequate coverage of local news, is now organizing a public protest. “I think it is time to TAKE BACK THE LIGHT,” Whitney wrote in an announcement she began circulating last week.

“I am now initiating a focused protest on Monday, June 11, as TAKE BACK THE LIGHT DAY. If you have strong opinions about the Point Reyes Light, take your paper back to the editor at the office in Point Reyes Station and communicate verbally or in writing why you feel as you do. You can also mail your paper back with your comments to Box 210, Point Reyes Station 94956, if you find this easier.”

On Monday of this week, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll wrote that the redesigned Light, which is heavy on color and light on local news, “looks like an alumni bulletin. The writing is terrible, but Plotkin is apparently not a words guy. Plotkin is a Plotkin guy.”

Plotkin’s malicious coverage of a deputy’s taking me into custody a year ago and having the county psych ward check to see if I was suicidal was “sleazy,” Carroll wrote in Monday’s Chronicle.

(In fact, as soon as county staff talked to me, they determined I was not suicidal, had no signs of emerging psychological problems, and should be immediately sent home in a taxi, which I was at county expense.)

Light reporter Micah Maidenberg, who wrote the story under Plotkin’s direction, knew all this from the public record, for I had emailed him copies. Maidenberg also knew the deputy went to my house after Plotkin made a bogus claim that I was suicidal. In addition, Maidenberg interviewed me, and I gave him straightforward answers.

However, neither the facts contained in the public record, nor my answers to his questions, nor his boss’s involvement were included in Maidenberg’s story, which instead lumped me in with a violent man from Bolinas who was taken to the psych ward and attacked a doctor.

Maidenberg, by the way, is the same reporter who in March wrote the story identifying various Latino residents of West Marin as documented or undocumented immigrants.

Community leaders including Sacred Heart Church’s Father Jack O’Neill, Toby’s Feed Barn owner Chris Giacomini and his manager Oscar Gamez, Marin Community Foundation director Carlos Porrata and his wife Rebecca, Point Reyes Books owner Steve Costa, Cabaline Saddlery owner Vicki Leeds, 13 prominent Latinos, and a number of other well-known townspeople have publicly questioned Plotkin’s “journalistic ethics” in publishing Maidenberg”s story.

Not surprisingly, Maidenberg has given notice he’s leaving as of the end of this week. Maidenberg’s departure, however, is the least of The Light’s problems.

Don Deane, publisher of The Coastal Post in Bolinas, has brought in Jeanette Pontacq of Point Reyes Station as editor. Under her, The Coastal Post has introduced color photos, is covering more West Marin news, and is picking up more advertisers.

On Wednesday, Deane told me he and Pontacq are also discussing publishing twice as often, fortnightly instead of monthly. However, he noted, no final decision has been made.

One decision that is final was made by Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, and Caldwell of Marin Sun Printing. They are about to start a new weekly newspaper in West Marin.

Debuting Friday, June 1, will be The West Marin Pilot. At least that is its tentative name. The public will be asked to submit suggestions for the final name. Hack said the first issue will be an eight-page introductory copy. Each week from July 1 on, it will be published full size and sell for $1 a copy.

Former Light editor Jim Kravets of Fairfax (left) will edit the weekly. Former Light advertising representative Sandy Duveen of Woodacre will sell advertisng.

Caldwell told me Kravets and Duveen will both share in the ownership. Like Caldwell, both of them have had a hard time collecting thousands of dollars Plotkin owes them.

As for The Navigator’s Hack, Plotkin is suing him and me for Hack’s letting me post items on his Sonoma County website. Plotkin has claimed that the postings violated The Light’s sales agreement in which I agreed not to work for another Marin County newspaper.

In a ruling that defies common sense, and presumably the law, Marin Superior Court Judge Jack Sutro last fall ruled a Sonoma County website is the same as a Marin County newspaper and ordered me to stop posting on it. That ruling is now before an appeals court.

Also planning to work for The Pilot are: Missy Patterson of Point Reyes Station, who for 25 years has handled the front desk at The Light; former Light historian Dewey Livingston of Inverness, who used to contribute West Marin’s Past; feature writer Ellen Shehadeh of Inverness, who had been a frequent contributor to The Light; obituary writer Larken Bradley of San Rafael, who had won a variety of state and national journalism awards while at The Light; and Charlie Morgan of Inverness Park, who covers sports events for KWMR, will be the sports writer.

Caldwell told me The Pilot is still deciding where to have its office and might even move into the Creamery Building, where The Light is also located. As Duveen (right) remarked with a laugh: “That would be a hoot.”

“The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair,” wrote the French playwright Jean Baptiste Poqulin Moliere (1622-73). Indeed it is, and I’ve been keeping a record.

Now I don’t claim to believe in such miracles, but a recognizable apparition of Jesus (or is it Moammar Khadafy?) appears on the glass door of my woodstove almost every time I light a fire.

I’ve repeatedly cleaned all traces of soot and creosote off the glass, only to have the apparition’s sad visage reappear again and again.

Pilgrims, supplicants, and expatriated Libyans are invited to send comments to SparselySageAndTimely.com in order to receive information on visiting hours and donations expected at the door.

In an article on biological clocks, the Feb. 17-23 Economist noted, “People produce urine fastest at 6 p.m. They are most likely to develop an allergic reaction at 11 p.m. And 1 a.m. is a prime time for pregnant women to go into labour.” The Economist is British, hence the un-American spelling of “labor.”

If all this is true, I reasoned, 6 p.m. must begin a flush hour that follows the rush hour, so I called North Marin Water District and talked to Ryan Grisso in water operations. Is there, I asked, a spike in water use at 6 p.m. each day à la the supposed spike at halftime during the Super Bowl?

Ryan checked with his supervisor Brad Stompe and called back to say water use does indeed spike at 6 p.m. However, he added, it also spikes at 6 a.m., so he and Brad were unable to attribute the spikes simply to flushing. They could also have to do with people starting to cook, Ryan said.

It occurred to me, however, that numerous people get out of bed around 6 a.m., and at that hour too, their bodies would function in time with their biological clocks. All the same, the 6 a.m. spike wouldn’t necessarily conflict with the cooking theory, for much of the commuter crowd also starts fixing breakfast around 6 a.m.

For now, I guess, we’ll just have to leave it all dangling and pose another question.

Last week I photographed a raven perched on my birdbath as it tore apart some long, worm-like prey.

What was the prey? All I could tell for sure was that its hide was segmented, its flesh was bright pink, and it was surprisingly long. So I asked Point Reyes Station ornithologist Rich Stallcup what the bird was eating.

He wrote back that he although could not tell me precisely, it is probably a big grub (beetle larva) or possibly a larval ceanothus silk worm.

“It is not a snake, lamprey, or eel,” Stallcup added with good humor.

As it happened, I photographed a ceanothus silkmoth on my kitchen door a few weeks ago.

If that was one of its larvae being eaten, West Marin just lost a soon-to-be beautiful resident.

But then, there’s no figuring out animals, at least some of the time.

When I moved to Point Reyes Station 32 years ago, my former wife Cathy and I owned a Rhodesian ridgeback named Maria. Despite her size, 120 pounds, Maria was hardly an aggressive dog, but she was a guard dog. We had gotten her after finding prowlers peering in our windows while we were still living in Monte Rio. However, once we moved to Point Reyes Station, Maria’s main guard duties were reduced to scaring stray cats off our deck and lying on our steps keeping watch for our return.

When we did return up our driveway at the end of each workday, I always found it reassuring to spot Maria lying in the grass between the railroad-tie treads of our stairs.

Maria died almost three decades ago, so I felt a bit of déja  vu last week when I noticed a blacktail deer had taken over her lookout spot.

I’d never had a guard deer before, but I felt confident it would have caused a commotion had a prowler tried to climb my stairs while it was lying there.

We’ll end with another item from The Economist, which curiously refers to itself as a “newspaper” and not a news “magazine,” which it is.

The word “notorious” has been used facetiously so often that some people have forgotten what it really means. Just as a reminder, The American Heritage Dictionary defines “notorious” as “known widely and usually unfavorably; infamous: a notorious gangster; a district notorious for vice.”

Given what the word means, I was surprised this week by a large advertisement in the April 28-May 4 issue of The Economist for “the São Paulo Ethanol Summit 2007.” The ad proclaims that “Brazil [is] ahead once again” in renewable energy, and describes the summit as “the first event of global expression on this matter with the notorious presence of worldwide leaders, CEOs, scientists, researchers, economical and political authorities.”

Sounds like a “notorious” gathering, alright.

Despite not holding the reins on his team, the ever-political Sheriff Bob Doyle takes part in the Western Weekend Parade.

As some of you no doubt read in The Marin Independent Journal, atty. Ladd Bedford on April 12 filed on my behalf a false-imprisonment lawsuit against the County of Marin and sheriff’s deputy Josh Todt.

The lawsuit also lists as defendants “DOEs One through Five” be identified by “their true names [and] capacities when ascertained.”

In an incident which Sheriff Bob Doyle later blamed on my talking over the head of a “beat deputy,” I was chained and handcuffed on March 1 a year ago and taken to the psych ward at Marin General Hospital as supposedly being at risk of suicide.

Atty. Bedford in presenting a claim against county, which was routinely rejected, described what happened to me on that Wednesday morning while I was reading that day’s Chronicle and finishing breakfast:

“Without warning, a deputy from the Marin County Sheriff’s Department appeared at Mitchell’s home and asked to enter the residence. The deputy questioned him at length about his mental state and suicidal tendencies.

“Mitchell cooperated with the deputy and explained that he did not intend to commit suicide anytime in the near future and that he was not a danger to himself or anyone else.”

In fact, as atty. Bedford’s claim notes, I “was busy at home preparing for a court hearing scheduled for the following morning involving a civil matter and was preparing to receive two major achievement awards.”

The Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter was about to present me with a “lifetime achievement” award during a ceremony in San Francisco, and I was in the midst of lining up rides for friends attending from West Marin. Presenting the award would be KQED radio host Michael Krasny (to my left above) and CBS-Channel 5 news anchor Ken Bastida (to my right).

The second award was a Resolution of Commendation from the Marin Board of Supervisors on the occasion of my retirement. During the presentation ceremony, I would also receive US House of Representatives honors thanks to Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey.

I was hosting a reception in a Civic Center garden following the ceremony, and that week, I was working out the details with a caterer. Ironically, among the guests I had invited was Sheriff Bob Doyle, but after I asked him how it happened that I was mistakenly taken into custody, Doyle chose not to attend.

“Furthermore,” atty. Bedford noted, a windstorm Sunday night-Monday morning had ripped shingles off my roof, and I “had scheduled roofers to come and fix [my] roof in two days.”

After receiving my awards, I planned to spend much of the rest of the year taking a “victory lap,” to see cousins elsewhere in the United States and in Canada, I told deputy Todt. And, in fact, I subsequently did.

Well, what about next year, after my “victory lap?” Todt asked. Would I commit suicide then? I laughed and told the deputy it was a ridiculous question, mentioning a character in French literature who was about to commit suicide, but the national elections were that day, and he wanted to know who would win. By the time the results were in, I told the deputy, the guy was no longer interested in suicide.

You can’t predict how anyone will feel about much of anything in a year, five years, or 20 years, I pointed out with good humor. And if I were to someday kill myself, I twice told deputy Todt, “it would almost certainly take the form of smoking myself to death.”

Deputy Todt, who presented himself as having developed expertise in dealing with people in crisis, asked me a few more questions about suicide in general. Because of the generality of the questions, I told him what some important thinkers had written about it. Having taught college World Literature, I was familiar with, for example, what Herman Hesse in Steppenwolf and Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus had to say about suicide.

The opening sentence of Camus’ famous essay, I told Todt, is: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” However, I stressed that Camus also wrote that even if one decides life isn’t worth living, that doesn’t mean he will, or should, commit suicide. I quoted Camus as pointing out, “The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation.”

The fact that I was conversant on a topic Camus considered the “one truly serious philosophical problem” apparently caused deputy Todt to assume I must be ready to commit suicide. I was then handcuffed, chained, and hauled off in the cage of a patrolcar to the psych ward. I didn’t resist; there was no point; but I was mortified.

“Mitchell suffered much of the day in an austere sitting room with drunks and mentally disabled people,” atty. Bedford’s claim noted. “Later that day, Mitchell was eventually examined by personnel at the hospital. Those personnel determined that Mitchell was not suicidal, that he had no emergent psychiatric issues, and that he should be released to go home.

“The personnel at the hospital called a taxi for Mitchell and arranged for payment of the $70 cab fare from the hospital back to Mitchell’s residence in Point Reyes. Mitchell gave the cab driver a $10 tip.”

I later complained to Sheriff Doyle that I apparently was taken into custody for merely giving straightforward answers to an unsophisticated deputy who was posing as sophisticated in such matters. “What got you into trouble,” the sheriff responded, “was answering the door.”

Wow! I had always considered the sheriff’s deputies my friends, and now the sheriff himself was telling me I was putting myself at risk by answering their knock at the door. “Unless they have a warrant,” atty. Bedford has since added. Doyle’s response was as threatening as Todt’s had been humiliating.

Doyle bristled when I pointed out that the timing of the deputy’s arrival that Wednesday morning was suspicious and that perhaps his deputies had been deliberately misled.

As it happened, I had learned at midday Tuesday that I had a court hearing with the new owner of The Point Reyes Light, Robert Plotkin, Thursday morning. After talking with atty. Bedford, I discovered I had only a few hours to collect witnesses’ statements against Plotkin and had begun doing so. Todt’s action effectively sabotaged my ability to adequately present my side of the case.

So why did deputy Todt come to the door that morning? Supervisor Steve Kinsey told me that, according to Sheriff Doyle, Lt. Scott Anderson, commander of the West Marin substation, sent Todt to my home in response to statements from Plotkin. In a deposition, Plotkin later admitted he’d told deputies I was suicidal.

The new owner of The Light Robert Plotkin lives well but currently owes former staff and his former printer thousands of dollars.

Before my lawsuit was filed, I told Supervisor Kinsey my main concern was to have government records cleared of my having been mistakenly taken into custody as supposedly on the verge of suicide.

In this age of Homeland Security checks and a few officers, such as Todt, who sometimes don’t exercise common sense, having a Sheriff’s Department blunder on my record could come back to haunt me.

Kinsey did his best to intercede on my behalf but got nowhere. Doyle and the County Counsel seemed to think I wouldn’t risk the embarrassment of publicly admitting what happened to me. That’s the way rape victims were intimidated from pressing charges until the courts stopped identifying them by name.

Because Sheriff Doyle refused to take an administrative action to clear my name, we now have a lawsuit that will set the record straight and inevitably cost county government thousands of dollars to defend.

Too many rainbows? The first week of April, it rained at my cabin virtually every day or night. A factoid reflected in this photo from my deck is that the sky is always darkest outside the arc of a rainbow. The reason is a bit complex, but if you want a good explanation, check the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research website: http://www.eo.ucar.edu/rainbows/

Rain having fallen almost every day or night since April began, the grass in my pasture is high, and neighbor Toby Giacomini’s stockpond is full. Water districts like late rains so their reservoirs are full going into the dry months.

All the same, I’m already ready for May. So are half the people in West Marin. The other half (apart from ranchers and water district operators) are a contrary lot; more than a few of them are here because they’re not wanted someplace else, or because they are.

In any case, the minute someone mentions being tired of rain, someone else pops up with with Al Jolson’s (at left) 1947 lyrics: “Though April showers may come your way,/ They bring the flowers that bloom in May./ So if it’s raining, have no regrets/ Because it isn’t raining rain you know. It’s raining violets.”

On the other hand, April showers may cause some of us, who in school had to plow through the field of English literature, to instead recall the grim opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Wasteland:

“April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain.”

In the late 1960s, I taught English Literature, World Literature, and Journalism at Upper Iowa College. I liked teaching the poetry of Eliot (below right), but I prefer listening to Chaucer’s, the masterpiece of which is The Canterbury Tales written in Middle English during the late 1300s.

So I was a bit surprised when almost 40 years after I left teaching for newspapering, it suddenly dawned on me last week that the opening lines of The Wasteland satirize the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales:

“Whan that aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,/ And bathed every veyne in swich licour/ Of which vertu engendred is the flour.”

In Modern English, that would be something along the lines of: “When April with its showers sweet has pierced to the root the drought of March and bathed every vein the moisture whose essence begets the flower.”

With all this going on and the “male foweles maken melody,” wrote Chaucer (right), “thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”

Eliot naturally saw April more darkly and went on in The Wasteland to ask, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?”

Personally, I am not one of those folk longing to go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury or anywhere else (too much walking); my view of April is certainly less gloomy than Eliot’s; so I was almost taken in by Jolson’s advice:

“When you see clouds upon the hills,/ You soon will see crowds of daffodils./ So keep on looking for a bluebird/ And listening for his song/ Whenever April showers come along.”

As it happens, I planted daffodils along my driveway last October. Five weeks ago, Dee Goodman, formerly a Point Reyes Station innkeeper and now living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, arrived for a visit. On her first day back in town (above), the daffodils I’d planted came into bloom.

Dee, however, observed that if West Marin residents were to follow Jolson’s advice and search the hills for daffodils following April’s showers, they’d miss them by at least a month. “A better flower for April would be the Forget-Me-Not,” Dee suggested, having just noticed them in profusion along Nicasio Valley Road north of Moon Hill.

Eliot, no doubt, would have agreed.

As I was driving through San Geronimo Friday, I was reminded of the days when I covered Sheriff’s Calls for The Point Reyes Light. Every couple of years, some motorist would notify sheriff’s deputies he had been driving past the San Geronimo Valley Golf Course when his car was hit by a golf ball. Last week, it finally happened to me.

The ball came off a fairway south of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, bounced on the shoulder, and then off the hood of my car. It didn’t do any damage; however, it felt like a rite of passage: somewhat akin to Bolinas and Stinson Beach motorists being inducted into the Lagoon Club but without all the mess.

Immediately I knew how I would begin this week’s blog entry, but what I didn’t figure on is what would happen next.

Surprisingly big pot busted by hurricane-force gusts

Helping keep this blog online is computer technician Keith Matthews of Point Reyes Station, and for Christmas he gave me his copy of the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins. Matthews said he’d spent the last year working his way through the dictionary and thought I too might find it interesting. I already have.

As it happened, when I opened the dictionary, the first word my eye fell upon was “halcyon.” Although I seldom use the word, I have occasionally quipped about “the halcyon days of yore” in referring to mellower times, but I knew nothing about the word’s origin. It turns out, “halcyon” has had particularly ironic meaning for West Marin these the past few weeks.

Here’s the Morris Dictionary’s explanation of the word: “Halcyon (pronounced HAL-see-un) is an adjective meaning ‘calm and peaceful.’ It comes from the Greek word for kingfisher. Legend was that the kingfisher’s brooding period was the seven days before and the seven days after the shortest day of the year. Since the kingfisher’s nest was believed to be borne on the waves of the ocean, it followed that during this period the weather would surely be calm and peaceful, or “halcyon.”

Tuesday evening after this week’s storm had caused a several-hour blackout, I mentioned to Nina Howard of Point Reyes Station that the foul weather ran afoul of the original meaning of halcyon. I explained about the Greeks believing the kingfisher’s nest floated on the ocean and, therefore, needed calm weather to get through the brooding that supposedly occurred at this time of year.

“Did the Greeks ever see any kingfishers nesting on the ocean?” Nina asked. “Not that I know of,” I told her, but scholars in ancient Greece, even Aristotle, weren’t into empiricism.

“Well, so much for that theory,” remarked Nina.

Waking Wednesday from the night’s heavy rains, high winds, and several-hour-long blackouts, I looked out on my deck Wednesday morning to see if the storm had caused any damage. What I saw was a big pot bust.

Indeed, lying busted up on my deck was a heavy, terra cotta flowerpot that had blown off my picnic table. A root ball from the chrysanthemums and ice plant growing in it was still intact, and later in the day I was able to find another large pot at Toby’s Feed Barn and replant the flowers.

Predictably, the most noticeable damage I spotted around my property was not to my flowerpot. On the way into town, I discovered a massive limb had broken off one of the pines of my neighbors, and part of the tree was sticking into Campolindo Drive.

Someone had stuck orange traffic cones around it, giving maintenance of our private road a sort of Public Works Department ambiance.

What got me out of my cabin before showering and shaving Wednesday morning, however, was not finding a replacement for my broken flowerpot. Two friends called to say that Manka’s had caught fire during the night and was still burning. Owner Margaret Grade is a long-time friend, so I immediately headed for Inverness to see what was happening to her restaurant. That story follows.

Biographical information on newspaperman Dave Mitchell
Editor & publisher emeritus, The Point Reyes Light

Born in San Francisco, Nov. 23, 1943

Point Reyes Light, editor & publisher (1975-1981 & 1984-2005)

San Francisco Examiner, general assignment reporter, war correspondent, transportation writer (1981-1983)

The Sebastopol Times, editor (1973-1975)

The (Sonora) Daily Union Democrat, county government reporter (1971-1973)

The Council Bluffs Nonpareil, city hall reporter (1970)

Upper Iowa College, instructor of World Literature, Freshman English, English Literature, and Journalism. Faculty advisor to the student newspaper, The Collegian, and the black-student union, The Brotherhood (1968-1970)

Leesburg (Florida) High School, teacher of Speech and Literature and faculty advisor to the student newspaper (spring semester 1968)

Marvel Academy in Rye, New York, teacher of English and history (fall semester 1967)

Education:

Stanford University, master’s degree in Communications, 1967
Stanford University, bachelor’s degree in English with minor in History & Political Science, 1965
Principia Upper School in St. Louis, Missouri (1960-1961)
Berkeley High School in California (1958-1959)

An English major at Stanford, I graduated a quarter later than the rest of my class; in a moment of bohemian romanticism, I had left Stanford for three months in 1964 to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts. After graduating from Senator Leland Stanford’s “Farm,” I returned to Stanford in 1966-67 and received a master’s degree in Communications with a concentration in print media. My return was just as impulsive as my earlier fling at becoming an artist; I didn’t apply for graduate school (or even choose a field of study) until the first day of fall registration. To my parents’ surprise, as much as my own, I ultimately left Stanford as a budding journalist.

I taught high school for a year divided between Rye, a suburb of New York City, and Leesburg in Lake County, Florida. Lake County at that time was still mostly segregated, and I briefly worked to register black voters in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat a brutal, racist sheriff, Willis V. McCall.

Two years teaching at Upper Iowa College followed. Along with teaching in the English Department, I was the faculty advisor to the black-student union and the student newspaper.

Next came three years reporting for daily newspapers in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Sonora, California, followed by editing a weekly in Sebastopol, California. In 1975, my former wife Cathy and I bought the weekly Point Reyes Light on the rural coast 40 miles north of San Francisco.

The Light won the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service in 1979. It was only the fourth year since the Pulitzers began in 1917 that a prize in any division (e.g., editorial writing, foreign correspondence, breaking-news photography) went to a weekly. In The Light’s case, the prize was for an exposé and editorial crusade, both of which I mostly wrote, of the increasingly violent Synanon cult. Working with me on the investigation were Cathy and a UC Berkeley sociologist, Richard Ofshe. With their help, I subsequently wrote a book about our investigation, The Light on Synanon, which was made into a two-hour movie for CBS called Attack on Fear. Actor Paul Michael Glazer (AKA Starsky) played me.

I reported for the old San Francisco Examiner from 1981 to 1983 following Cathy’s and my divorce, which forced us to sell The Light. At The Examiner, I covered, among many other things, the post-war refugee crisis in Southeast Asia and the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala.

I reacquired The Point Reyes Light through a default action in late 1983. Although the paper remained small (about 4,000 circulation with a staff of eight), I sent reporters and photographers all over the world to research historic waves of immigration to Point Reyes. Over 20 years, reporters tracked immigrant families to relatives in southern Mexico (three times), Switzerland’s Italian-speaking Canton of Ticino, Croatia during its civil war, the Irish Republic along with pre-cease-fire Ulster, and Portugal’s mid-Atlantic Azores. The series revealed why five waves of immigration (beginning in 1850 and continuing to the present) have left the Old Country for Point Reyes and how they have fared since reaching West Marin’s shores. The lives of immigrants and their descendants were compared with the lives of relatives whose part of the family stayed in the Old Country.

In 2000, I myself returned to Central America to write a report on Guatemalan politics for the online Miami Herald, as well as The Light. This led directly to my brief marriage to a Guatemalan. Indirectly it led to The Light’s winning state and national awards for a series on an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who in 2003 was found beaten nearly to death in Bolinas. Light reporters and photographers (including my wife Ana Carolina and stepdaughter Anika) working both in West Marin and Guatemala revealed how the man’s personal misfortune was a catastrophe for his family. As the series showed, he had been supporting nine children and an extremely ill wife living in rural poverty in a remote region of Guatemala. The series helped raise funds for the family, and eventually $30,000 was collected to finance a heart operation for the wife and schooling for the children.

In November 2005, I retired. A former Monterey County deputy district attorney, Robert Israel Plotkin, bought all the stock of The Point Reyes Light corporation. Plotkin, who had recently moved from Taos to Bolinas, was raised in San Diego but attended college and law school in New York.

Awards

The Point Reyes Light won 108 national, regional, and state journalism awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize, during my 27 years as editor and publisher. After my retirement, I received a Career Achievement award from the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter, and the Marin County Board of Supervisors held its own ceremony to present me with a resolution honoring my work at The Light.

The front of the Pulitzer gold medal contains an image of Benjamin Franklin, who was a colonial printer and publisher along with being a statesman and inventor. It is inscribed: Honoris Causa. Awarded by Columbia University to Point Reyes Light. The back of the medal, which shows a printer at a colonial, hand-operated press, says: For Distinguished and Meritorious Public Service Rendered by a United States Newspaper During the Year 1979. Joseph Pulitzer Medal.

When Pulitzer in 1917 created the Pulitzer Prizes, he opted to give a cash prize to every winning writer or photographer. Only one prize, For Distinguished and Meritorious Public Service, was earmarked for a newspaper, not individuals. Pulitzer assumed a cash prize wouldn’t mean much to a newspaper, so he decided that Public Service winners should instead receive a gold medal. Under the rules he laid down, the medal was to contain exactly $500 worth of gold at the time it was minted, so over the years, the amount of gold in the medal has been shrinking. This 14-carat-gold medal is the size of a Mason Jar lid.

The new owner of The Point Reyes Light has fabricated so much in court papers and public statements that I feel compelled to respond. Related topics included here: Robert Israel Plotkin found to be frequently filing lawsuits. Robert Plotkin and mother defendants in US bankruptcy court in connection with a $77 million Ponzi scheme. Plotkin’s attorney Robert H. Powsner, 77, blames his own “forgetfulness” as he attempts to explain away a web of lies in his court filings.

Here are the facts regarding the litigation filed by The Point Reyes Light’s new owner Robert Israel Plotkin against me, the former owner, against Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, and against other people. Some of what is here was discovered by people not connected to the case.

1. The most-significant misconception about problems at The Point Reyes Light is that they center on disputes between new publisher Robert Plotkin and me. They don’t. In the first 12 months after he became publisher, 13 staff and contributors were fired, quit, or in various ways shown the door.

Some staff such as Gayanne Enquist of Inverness, Sandy Duveen of Woodacre, Jim Kravets of Fairfax, and Peter Jamison, formerly of Woodacre, did not have jobs lined up when they left. I, at least, am retired.

2. Prior to Robert Plotkin’s and my falling out last February, I had been working diligently to help the paper during its transition to new ownership as a consultant to the newsroom, a columnist, and a photographer. I have a five-year employment contact with The Light, which cannot be unilaterally terminated, but it pays only $175 per week to be available as a consultant. Nonetheless, I volunteered additional help as needed. Following the New Year’s Eve storm, I spent three days slogging through mud and wading through water to photograph the damage. However, as numerous people who have dealt with the new owner have discovered, he is frequently insulting and abrasive, and when he insulted me, we got into a shouting match in front of The Light.

Plotkin initially told bystanders and a sheriff’s deputy he was a victim of attempted murder, that I had tried to strangle him. However, hairdresser Barbara Keady, a witness who spoke with Plotkin immediately afterward, and sheriff’s deputy Ted Keehn both noted there were no marks on him. Plotkin had no visible injuries, deputy Keehn wrote in his incident report. Plotkin then added to his story that I had tried to run him down with my car after he and I started yelling at each other.

But when deputy Keehn interviewed witnesses, that story didn’t hold up either. Realtor Robert Cardwell told the sheriff’s deputy that he saw Plotkin and me arguing in front of Greenbridge Gas & Auto. When Plotkin got out of my car, I made an abrupt U-turn on Mesa Road and stopped in front of The Light with a wheel on the sidewalk, which is flush with the pavement (i.e. there is no curb). Mitchell got out of the red Acura and ran toward Plotkin, Deputy Keehn quotes the Realtor as saying. The deputy quoted hairdresser Barbara Keady as saying she saw Mitchell park his vehicle in front of The Point Reyes Light on the sidewalk. Mitchell got out of his vehicle and had a heated verbal argument with Plotkin. Sandy Duveen, who then sold advertising for The Light, told the deputy that after the Acura stopped abruptly in front of The Light, she saw Mitchell walk towards Plotkin, the officer reported.

So there was no attempt to strangle Plotkin or hit him with my car. As for my parking with one wheel on the sidewalk, anyone familiar Point Reyes Station’s old Creamery Building, where The Light is located, has often seen cars with at least one wheel on the sidewalk. Here, for example, is Plotkin’s own car parked mostly on the sidewalk.

3. Represented by Point Reyes Station attorney Robert Powsner, Plotkin then asked for a restraining order and later an injunction that prohibits me from being around him, his family, and his newspaper. Like other staff and contributors who have left, I had by then concluded Plotkin was immature and abrasive, as well as sometimes dishonest, so I had no problem agreeing to stay away from him.

When asking Marin Superior Court to issue a retraining order against me (because we had shouted at each other), Plotkin claimed he needed special protection because of my supposedly immense size. With his irrepressible flair for the dramatic, Plotkin told the court I am 6-foot, 6-inches tall and weigh 225 pounds. Now Plotkin, of course, was writing from the perspective of a short and pudgy (The Marin Independent Journal called him ‘pear-shaped’) 36 year old. Nonetheless, this 63-year-old retired editor is definitely not larger than pro football’s Terrell Owens, the big wide receiver. In reality, I am 45 pounds lighter and three inches shorter than what Plotlin cavalierly wrote in his sworn statement.

In the last five years, the former lawyer has filed lawsuits against six tenants, one against The Bodega Bay Navigator website and its owner Joel Hack, and two against me. He is also a defendant in US bankruptcy court. Although for a while he was a deputy district attorney in Monterey County, Plotkin is no longer licensed to practice law in California.

4. Long before Plotkin and I had our squabble, he had a falling out with The Light’s long-time cartoonist, Kathryn LeMieux of Tomales, who quit contributing. The Bodega Bay Navigator in Sonoma County had just converted from a weekly newspaper to a website, and owner Joel Hack invited LeMieux to post her cartoons on The Navigator site. After I agreed to Plotkin’s injunction, which forbids my even sending him email, Hack invited me to also start posting on his website, which I did. In an Aug. 14 lawsuit filed by Plotkin against Hack and me, he claims I induced LeMieux to become the cartoonist for The Navigator. (My supposedly recruiting LeMieux, Plotkin suggested, amounted to my unfairly helping a competitor.) But like other things Plotkin has said in his lawsuits, in The Light and to other reporters, this was a total fabrication. LeMieux had agreed to draw for the website before I was involved with it.

5. Attorney Robert Powsner on Plotkin’s behalf then got Judge Jack Sutro to issue a bizarre injunction against my posting on the Bodega Bay website. Plotkin and Powsner had told Judge Sutro that by letting me post writing and photos on The Navigator’s site, Hack was damaging or destroying The Light. The judge agreed, and in chambers he told lawyers for both sides that protecting Plotkin’s $500,000 investment in The Light outweighed constitutional prohibitions against censoring free expression.

In making his ruling, Judge Sutro came up with a seemingly illogical interpretation of the sales agreement signed by Plotkin and me when he bought The Light’s stock in November 2005. When I sold the stock to Plotkin, I agreed not to write for another Marin County newspaper. In deciding I was violating that agreement by posting on The Navigator website, Judge Sutro failed to acknowledge there is a difference between a website and a newspaper. Ironically, a Sixth Appellate District court ruling as recently as May in a case involving Apple Computers noted, “The term ‘newspaper’ presents little difficulty; it has always meant, and continues to mean, a regularly appearing publication printed on large format, inexpensive paper.

In addition to making no distinction between a website and a newspaper, Judge Sutro even more bizarrely failed to distinguish between a business being based in Marin County and a business being based in Sonoma County, where The Bodega Bay Navigator has always been located. The judge apparently accepted Plotkin’s boggling claim that the place of publication depends on what is written about in newspapers and websites, as well as in which communities they can be read.

Perhaps contributing to Judge Sutro’s confusion, Powsner and Plotkin untruthfully told Judge Sutro last August that The Navigator website “has no publishing or production facilities or premises in Sonoma County other than defendant Hack’s computer.” Exposing this fabrication, The Marin Independent Journal subsequently published a photograph of Hack working in The Navigator’s cluttered “shack,” a building located behind Hack’s Bodega Bay home.

Because Plotkin — in securing an injunction against The Bodega Bay Navigator and me — claimed that competition from The Navigator’s site is damaging or destroying The Light, Navigator owner Joel Hack and I as co-defendants are now assembling evidence such as this to demonstrate it is Plotkin himself who is “damaging or destroying” The Light. The injunction is now being appealed, and more litigation is expected. Under Plotkin’s ownership, many readers have complained about Light reporting that is inaccurate, sensationalistic, or inappropriate for a community newspaper. Subscriptions have been dropping, as Plotkin admitted in his Nov. 9 issue. This sign was spotted on the Stinson Beach Village Association bulletin board opposite the front door to the town post office. As co-defendants having to ward off Plotkin, Hack and I would welcome submissions of any legally significant evidence showing that whatever wounds The Light has suffered have been self-inflicted rather than caused by competition from The Navigator website: http://www.bodegabaynavigator.info/interiorpages/WMarinNews/WMarinNews.htm.

6. I am getting excellent legal representation from attorney Ladd Bedford and Arman Javid of the San Francisco law firm McQuaid, Bedford, and VanZandt, and we will appeal Judge Sutro’s injunction, now that he has finally signed it. In addition, retired attorney Judy Teichman of Inverness Park is working as a volunteer on my behalf.

7. In the meantime, some fascinating West Marin stories are being left uncovered. How in the world, for example, did “co-defendant Robert Israel Plotkin end up in federal bankruptcy court this fall in connection with a $77 million Ponzi scheme? The case was investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office.

The ringleaders, Moshe Leichner and Zvi Leichner, are now serving time in prison, a US bankruptcy trustee is trying, so far without success, to get at money the Leichners squirreled away in one Swiss and two Israeli bank accounts, and the Justice Department has warned the ringleaders they may be deported.

A US bankruptcy trustee has reported that last year he filed over 150 adversary proceedings. These proceedings seek recovery of funds in excess of $20 million in pre-petition transfers made by [Moshe and Zvi Leichner] to insiders and other parties.

A federal hearing was held in October, with attorney Powsner representing codefendant Robert Israel Plotkin, according to court papers. Plotkin’s mother Zaporah Bank of Los Angeles, another defendant, is representing herself.

As explained by CPA Grant Newton, an expert witness hired by the bankruptcy court, the Leichners from 1998 to 2003 operated a Ponzi scheme: namely, a phony investment arrangement whereby earlier investors are paid fictitious profits from the funds of later investors.

The Leichners’ Ponzi scheme operated under the name Midland Euro, and the US Justice Department notes, “The Leichners told their investors that Midland Euro would invest their funds in foreign currencies which Midland Euro would then trade on the international currency market for profit. Although the terms of the investments tended to vary slightly among victims, generally, the Leichners claimed Midland Euro would generate guaranteed monthly profits of between 2% and 4%.”

So the question we are left with is: how much did Robert Plotkin know and when did he know it? It may merely be that in contriving to make an unbelievably high guaranteed profit in the high-risk, foreign-currency-exchange market, Plotkin got involved with shady characters. However, he can hardly claim to be financially since he is enough of an investor to own or have recently owned, besides The Light, an $840,000 seaside home in Bolinas, another house in Taos, New Mexico, real estate in New York City, and rental homes in San Diego County. I have no idea how much of this he presently owns or whether he will even stick around West Marin too much longer. Although he has by now owned a home in Bolinas for two years, the BMW he drives to work still carries New Mexico license plates.

As for the real estate in San Diego, Robert Plotkin went into that county’s superior court six times in five years, seeking to have tenants evicted. If you add to those six lawsuits the two Plotkin filed against me this year and the one he filed against Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, you get a sense of just how litigious this former lawyer is.

8. Another curious story not receiving coverage is the role of Point Reyes Station lawyer Robert H. Powsner, who is representing Plotkin against Bodega Bay Navigator owner Joel Hack, the federal bankruptcy trustee, and me.

As it happens, Powsner’s law firm is one of three I had been using, depending on the nature of the issues. My current attorney, Ladd Bedford, who has been a friend since our days together at Stanford, gave my former wife Cathy and me free day-to-day advice during The Light’s Synanon investigation. The Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe law firm, likewise at no charge, successfully fought off six lawsuits totaling $1.032 billion, which lawyers for the Synanon cult filed against the two of us. One case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, where Heller Ehrman won a major legal precedent that greatly increased California reporters’ right to keep confidential sources confidential in civil cases.

In addition, I had hired attorney Powsner to represent me in a variety of matters, including one out-of-court dispute involving my firing of an intern when he failed to cover a major storm, as assigned. After firing him, I had to stop the intern from running off with the office keys. What I didn’t know until a witness’ sworn statement this year was that the intern had been ripped on cocaine at the time.

Attorney Powsner’s photo
and his description
of his practice can be found at:
lawyers.nolo.com/attorney.cfm?attorneyID=422&LocationID=19&specialtyID

When I hired Bedford and not Powsner to draft the sales agreement for The Light, Powsner went ballistic – perhaps because he owed The Light about $4,000 at the time and would have liked to work off the debt. In any case, when I approached him for help in dealing with Plotkin, Pownser announced he was switching clients and intended to represent Plotkin against me.

Under the California State Bar’s Code of Ethics, Powsner should have refused to fight a former client in court since he has confidential information about that client. The reason for the rule became immediately obvious; Powsner (before finding out that cocaine was the likely cause of the intern’s behavior) repeatedly tried to dig up more information about that dispute to use against me on Plotkin’s behalf.

My attorneys have asked a court commissioner to disqualify attorney Powsner because he had previously represented me. In particular, he had attempted to use information from the intern dispute, against me on behalf of a new client. Powsner, who is 77, responded with a surprising rationalization for his investigating on behalf of Plotkin an out-of-court dispute that he negotiated as my lawyer: it was simply a matter of his “forgetfulness.” That would be an amazing admission for any lawyer to make – and especially one who is still practicing in his seventy-eighth year and would like to continue.

Powsner told the court commissioner that until he read my present lawyers’  motion to disqualify him, he “hadn’t remembered anything about the [intern] matter (which was in 1998) nor that it existed nor any information about it.”

Powsner apparently also forgot that in the months before the motion to disqualify him was filed, he had talked over the matter with my lawyer and one of my lawyer’s partners, Arman Javid, as well as The Light’s former business manager Don Schinske, The Light’s former typesetter Cat Cowles, The Light’s present front-office manager Missy Patterson, and (as he himself would later acknowledge) his own secretary Susan Cofano and his new client Robert Plotkin.

As my attorneys then pointed out to court commissioner Roy Chernus, “Robert Powsner is caught in a web of lies. Mr. Powsner’s new declaration not only contradicts his own assertions and the declarations of three witnesses, but it contradicts his own assertions several times within the same document. All the previous untruths prevent Mr. Powsner from keeping his story straight.”

Attorney Powsner now has his own attorney, Peter Flaxman of Mill Valley, to help untangle him from his  web of lies. In the meantime, a complaint has been sent to the State Bar regarding forgetful Bob’s unethical conduct.

Update: Ultimately, I countersued Plotkin, and in January 2008, he and I announced we had settled the litigation between us. I was pleased with the financial and non-financial aspects of the settlement, but we agreed to keep the details confidential.

So you managed to find your way down here. Come on in. Welcome to my digs.

Keeping a log on the web (i.e. a blog) is a bit like keeping a log on a ship. It includes both a journal of one’s trip through life and reports on significant events along the way.

How a web log came to be called a blog, by the way, reflects the whimsy that has long characterized those who gambol on the World Wide Web of the Internet. A blogger named Jorn Barger coined the term in a Dec. 17, 1997, entry on his site, jokingly turning web log into we blog. And who is Jorn Barger? Wikipedia reports he is editor of Robot Wisdom, has taught at Northwestern, once lived at The Farm (Stephen Gaskin’s commune in Tennessee), has written articles criticized as anti-Semitic, and as far back as 1994 offered us bloggers the cautionary observation: “The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post… and vice versa.”

If Barger is right, however, blogging is unique among all the forms of storytelling. When most of us encounter something interesting, we can’t wait to tell others about it.

And that’s what this blog will mostly consist of: stories, comments, and photography that reflect my life and interests as a resident of Point Reyes Station. The purpose of this site is not to be an alternative to The Point Reyes Light, which I formerly owned, although it will periodically comment on the newspaper and, when need be, set the record straight.

But basically I’m more interested in events such as occurred Tuesday morning, Nov. 21, in Chileno Valley. As it happened, I was called upon to be a liaison between six orphaned fawns and two ranchers.

In a facility at her home, Susan Sasso of Olema had raised and rehabilitated the five small bucks and one doe on behalf of WildCare, the San Rafael nonprofit. She does it yearly, and it can be grueling work, feedings every four hours seven days a week when the fawns are newborn; sometimes every two hours when they’re sick. But by last week, the fawns at last were old enough to be released back into nature, and Susan asked me to contact two friends in Chileno Valley. The friends generously agreed to allow the deer to be released on their ranch. They themselves don’t hunt, and their ranch is large enough that the deer can wander over hill and dale without leaving the property. (The ranchers, by the way, have asked me to withhold their names lest I draw hunters to their land.)

The trick was getting the fawns from Olema to Chileno Valley. Early that Tuesday, Susan and another WildCare volunteer, Cindy Dicke also of Olema, gave the fawns injections to sedate them. Mike Vincilione of Point Reyes Station arrived in a pickup truck with camper shell, and the sleeping deer were loaded onto mats and towels in the truckbed. The drive to Chileno Valley took about 40 minutes, with Cindy riding among the deer.

The release itself went amazingly smoothly. Mike drove across a ranch bridge to a pasture bordered by a creek, and there each fawn was lifted gently out of the truck and laid on the grass.

Cindy then gave them all wake-up shots, and the fawns quickly revived. Some were wobbly enough when they first tried to stand that they had to be steadied lest they fall and injure themselves, but this lasted only for a minute or two.

Within roughly 10 minutes, five of the fawns were grazing while one of the bucks kept trying to mount another. It’s not about sex; it’s about domination, Susan explained. (Just like they say about prison, remarked computer guru Keith Matthews of Point Reyes Station when I recounted the incident.)

The fawns have now been on the ranch a week and appear to feel at home, to the point where the domineering buck tried to mount one of the ranchers. When that happens, Susan told her, just slap him. The other fawns are more leery of humans, and after a few more slaps, the lecherous buck probably will be too.

Most of the fawns brought to Susan are too weak to survive, and she loses far more than she saves. Within a year, cars and hunters may kill many of the deer she raises. Nor does West Marin have any shortage of blacktail deer. So why does Susan spend so much time and effort saving the few she can? Susan puts in the long hours simply because she is a humane person. Most of us feel sorry for sick and injured wildlife when we encounter it although we typically don’t see a way to help. Susan has found a way. And lest anyone imagine Susan has some New Age sense of humanity toward sufferers that aren’t human, I should note the Humane Society was founded in 1954 and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 130 years earlier.